Everything on the record was played, produced and recorded in one house. Fear Maintenance, the solo project of Burlington, Ontario musician Colin Adams, released a cover of Joy Division‘s “Shadowplay” with a video posted to the project’s own YouTube channel on 13 August 2026. The track is also on Spotify and other streaming services.

Adams built the project around other people’s songs. He describes the aim as to “simultaneously pay homage to and reimagine some of the darker songs from the post-punk bands of the late 1970s and 1980s, which inspired him to become a musician […]”

How Fear Maintenance rework ‘Shadowplay’

The version keeps the song’s structure and moves the weight onto the guitars. Where Martin Hannett’s 1979 production left space around the parts, Adams fills it with distortion and a thicker low end, pushing the arrangement toward Ministry-style industrial metal. He plays every part himself.

“Shadowplay” first appeared on “Unknown Pleasures”, the Joy Division debut album released by Factory Records in June 1979. The song has been covered repeatedly since, most visibly by The Killers, whose version was recorded for the soundtrack to Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis film “Control” and released as a download single on 9 October 2007.

About Fear Maintenance

Fear Maintenance is the solo project of Colin Adams, a musician based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Adams plays, produces and records the material alone in his home studio there.

The project revisits post-punk songs from the late 1970s and 1980s, taking the records that led Adams to pick up an instrument and putting them through heavier arrangements. No original material has been released under the name. “Shadowplay” is the current single, released with a video on 13 August 2026 and distributed to streaming platforms through LANDR.

Fear Maintenance has no Bandcamp page and no Discogs entry, and no label is involved. The project’s material is published through its YouTube channel and on streaming services, and no album or EP has been announced.

The Joy Division catalogue keeps drawing this kind of attention. Side-Line marked the anniversary of “Closer” in July 2026, forty-six years after the band’s second and final album appeared.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

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